MASSIVE CHALLENGE FACING LeBRON & COMPANY.
Three rounds of the NBA playoffs have culminated in a couple of incontrovertible and seemingly mutually exclusive facts. LeBron James is the best basketball player in the world, end of sentence. And his Cleveland Cavaliers are massive underdogs in the Finals.
It is, while a rematch pitting the same two teams against each other for the fourth straight season, a Finals that is a like a laboratory experiment set up to test the old NBA maxim that the team with the best player in a series will win.
It also feels at least a little like the Finals were decided a couple of nights ago when the Houston Rockets bricked their way to a Game 7 loss at home and set up the Golden State-Cleveland four-peat.
But back to those incontrovertible facts. James, in dragging the Cavs this far to make his eighth straight appearance in the Finals (split between Miami and Cleveland), has made the regular-season MVP award utterly moot. He has proven that he’s the best player in the league, no matter what might happen over the course of 82 games that he treats as a warmup act, like he’s workshopping his material in a dingy theatre before he takes it to the main stage. This year he even switched out half his fellow cast in mid-season for a bunch of new understudies and is still performing like a maestro.
LeBron is leading the NBA playoffs in points, assists, minutes, free throws, and field goals made and attempted. He’s done that kind of thing a few times in this ridiculous dominance of the Eastern Conference, but this season he has hoisted the Cavaliers on his shoulders to an even more silly degree. Over the past eight seasons in which a James-led team has never missed the Finals, someone has scored at least 40 points in an NBA playoff games 72 times. LeBron accounts for 17 of those over those eight years. Seven of them have come in 2018.
But as good as he has been, he comes into the Finals universally expected to lose. The Cavaliers are 101 underdogs in the series, the second-largest underdog in the past 30 seasons, according to ESPN (the Sixers were 20-1 underdogs to the Shaq/ Kobe Lakers in 2000). The last five Finals teams to be at least 7.5-to-1 underdogs have none even managed to last beyond six games.
Jeff Van Gundy, the former coach who will be one of the analysts on ABC’s Finals broadcasts, said on Monday that the Cavaliers will have to have an extraordinary three-point shooting night just to win a game. One game.
“This is the biggest difference that I remember between two teams heading into the Finals in my time in the NBA,” Van Gundy said. “I can’t — I can’t think of a bigger gap from a team perspective.”
It’s a fairly simple conclusion to reach: these same Warriors dusted off the Cavs in five games last season, and that Cleveland squad included Kyrie Irving as a second superstar and a number of role players who were part of the 2016 Cavs upset of and many of those bench guys were dumped midseason for a new supporting cast that has been largely a non-factor for Cleveland.
Van Gundy, blunt as ever, said this Finals matchup was “a letdown” after Golden State and Houston bashed each other’s heads in for seven games in the West finals.
“To me, Houston wasn’t just one half away from advancing to the Finals,” he said. “They were one half away from winning a championship.”
“So it will be interesting to see how competitive LeBron James can make this Finals, but any game they get in this Finals would be a huge upset, to me.”
That the result feels preordained has kicked off another round of speculation on whether the NBA would be better served by ditching the conference format at playoff time and seeding the teams one through 16 at the beginning of the second season. That format would have resulted in a Houston-Golden State final, assuming both made it through three series. Such a system has logistical problems related to crosscountry travel, and it would make for some odd matchups in the early rounds, but in an era where James seems to be able to take a halfdozen random fellows and win the East, one can see the merit of it.
Kevin Durant, last year’s Finals MVP, said he had no problem with a system that has produced the same two teams at the end for four years. “I think it’s great,” he said, a little deadpan. Durant also said he didn’t mind if it took a little of the drama and unpredictability out of the league.
“That’s what you have movies and music for,” he said.
Van Gundy, for one, said he likes the idea of 1-to-16 seeding, to make it more likely that the two best teams meet in the Finals. But he also noted that there was one other way to break the Warriors-Cavs repetitiveness.
“I think it’s up it other teams,” he said. “If we want to see a different Finals, then we’ve got to have other teams win.”
The other teams will have to try again next year.